Dingy. That was the first word that came to mind as the door clicked shut behind him. Dust hung heavily in the stale air, coating the floor like a dusting of spring snow. There was no way for any light to penetrate this place from the outside that he could see, nor was there any source of it inside. Yet, T’aakshi could see the entire interior of the tower. Rather than darkness, it was as though somebody had taken the twilight and draped it across everything inside like a heavy blanket.

  The room itself was a large and cavernous space. T’aakshi had been expecting furniture and staircases leading to upper floors. Instead, barren stone covered the empty floor, and above, he could see all the way to the cobweb-lined roof.

  The plain stone walls, however, caught his eye. Despite there being only a single door on the outside, here, similar wooden doors lined the wall all the way around. Stranger still, those same doors were built into the wall all the way to the ceiling, with no clear way of accessing them.

  He frowned, trying to ignore the way the dust made his nose and throat itch, and tried to puzzle out his next move. When he tried to access his own memories, he turned to the pages of a book he had constructed in his mind. Logically, this should be an infinitely larger version of what he did in his own mind, structured to consider the fact that hundreds had stored their memories here.

  The simplest way of dealing with things would be to have each person’s memories held behind a different door—he just had to figure out how to know which door was the one that he needed. He did a lap of the ground floor, examining each door in turn, trying to find some way of distinguishing one from any of the others.

  He had only examined a handful when he realised he could no longer pick out the door he had come through to enter. Each was identical, right down to the grain of the wood and location of their knots, as well as equidistant from the rest. Telling them apart was impossible, which left him very little option beyond simply trying out doors.

  He made for the closest and opened it wide, revealing only blackness within. T’aakshi stared intently, trying to pick out some detail or feature through the dark, but it was impenetrable. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead in defiance of the cool air of the tower. He licked his dry lips, and took a step into the room, but his foot never found its footing. T’aakshi pitched forward, breathless, any hope of catching himself already gone, panic tight in his chest.

  The dark pressed in at him from all sides as he fell, wind that wasn’t really wind whistling past his ears, making his loose undershirt billow out around him. He tensed, awaiting the sickening thud of flesh against stone; the crunch of his bones shattering upon impact. It never came. He sailed through eternal black, spinning and rotating slowly, until he could no longer tell if he was falling or flying.

  There was a pressure in the air. A heavy, expectant tension, like an arrow frozen mid-flight, just before impact with its target. The darkness that was not really darkness, that engulfed him so completely, waited for something. Waited for him.

  T’aakshi’s heart still raced, but he no longer braced himself for impact, knowing somehow that it would never come. This place was not real, merely the fluttering of pages in his mind as he searched for what he needed. Of course it waited. It needed him to decide where to go. What he needed to see. Faintly, he thought he could hear a wolf howling in the far distance.

  He closed his eyes, holding the picture of the beast in his mind, thinking of his need for information. Even as he did so, his heart ached. His father’s memories were here. Memories that had been left for him—

  His boots touched ground. The wind lashed at everything around him, but he didn’t feel its cutting breath. Nor did he feel the frigid chill in the air, even as his breath turned to mist as it left him. Deep anger that wasn’t his own stirred within him, anger like he’d never felt before, and with a start, he realised tears had begun to trail down his cheeks.

  “Is everything ready?”

  A gruff voice behind him had T’aakshi whirling on the spot to find its source. Two fur-clad men crouched beneath a rocky outcropping, spears in hand and hoods raised, hiding their faces. At the distance he was standing, the storm should have drowned any sound out, but he heard the reply as clearly as though it had been said across the firepit in his home back in the village.

  “Aye,” came the solemn reply. “We will do what must be done.”

  T’aakshi shut his eyes tight. Neither of these men was his father, or anybody he recognised. This wasn’t one of his memories. The moment the thought passed through him, the world around him lurched violently, tilting back and forth, sending him stumbling back and forth, struggling to maintain his bAn'naice.

  The two men in front of him did not seem to notice. The second speaker stood up straight and strode away, entirely unaware that his world was being shaken like a child’s toy. He brought a hand to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle that carved through even the howling of the wind.

  “Kanthakka, come!”

  The roar that answered the man’s call stopped T’aakshi’s heart dead in his chest. He knew the sound—how could he not? It had haunted his dreams since the creature it belonged to had taken his father from him. Its terrible silhouette broke through the cover of falling snow, looming over them all. T’aakshi scrambled back even as the world continued to spin, reaching for a weapon that he did not have. The man didn’t react but to walk towards the beast, and T’aakshi cried out a warning that he knew would not be heard.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Then, as the man got within arm’s reach of the beast, the floor beneath T’aakshi gave way, the images of the memory melting into black, and he fell through the blackness once again.

  No! Why had he left that memory? The wind that was not a wind rushed past his ears once more, and he fell into the black. T’aakshi could have screamed in frustration. Even here, the information he needed was being out dangled of his reach, slipping through his fingers at the last possible moment.

  The drop was shorter this time. Far shorter. His boots met wooden floorboards, and T’aakshi’s breath left him like he’d been struck. He knew this place. How could he not? This place had written itself across his memory as keenly as his parents’ faces. He breathed in, the scent of polished wood with just a hint of saltwater filling him, and took in the rest of his childhood home.

  The firepit in the middle flickered with gentle flame, a light steam rolling off of whatever was simmering in the pot suspended above it. To his left, his room lay darkened behind an animal skin overhang. On the right, was his parents’ room. His heart fluttered as he realised he could make out the muttering of two distinct voices on the other side of their door.

  He was moving almost before he’d consciously decided to look, a nagging voice in the back of his head reminding him he was not here for this, the only cause for hesitation. T’aakshi ignored it. He reached out to pull aside the hide separator, only for his hand to pass straight through it. T’aakshi blinked, jerking his hand back in his surprise. He supposed that would make sense—he wasn’t really here, after all.

  Tentatively at first, he stepped through the hide hanging and into the room beyond, his mouth falling open as he realised exactly when he was. His parents sat, huddled close on the end of their bed, far younger than he could ever remember them being. His father had no flecks of grey laced through his jet-black hair, and his mother’s dark eyes shone in the direction they both stared, entranced.

  In her arms, her mother held a bundle of blankets as though it were the most precious thing she’d ever held in her life. His father leaned toward it, hands reaching for something within, muttering nonsense words with a tenderness he had scarcely ever seen from him. Tears stung at his eyes, and T’aakshi almost staggered back out of the room at the sight, thoughts careening out of control.

  This was him. His father’s memory of him as a baby. Now that he knew when he was, he could pick out the emotions within him that were not his own. The protectiveness. The wall of terror that something might go wrong, that Saamu might not be a good enough father; that disease, or beast, or cold might steal his son away from him. The purest of love—a feeling so overwhelmingly strong that it tore at T’aakshi’s chest, and his knees buckled, dropping him to his knees, tears falling uncontrollably.

  Then, he was falling once more, his tears cast into the black abyss as he did. It was all he could do to take trembling, gasping breaths, as his thoughts spun out of control, his father’s emotions and his own indistinguishable in his mind. This was too much. He couldn’t do that again.

  The distraction of the hunt had made him think he was more ready to deal with the memories of his father than he actually was. Foolish. The strange old man had been right. He wasn’t ready for this. The wind howled in his ears as he fell, nigh deafening, for the very first time. Or was it the wind? The thought seemed unlikely, especially as other howls begun to join the first. Try as he might, T’aakshi couldn’t nail down the reason the sound sent a deathly cold chill running down his spine.

  His boots touched frost bitten ground before he could think about it further. This time, he stumbled, falling face-first into the frozen ground. T’aakshi lay still, fumbling desperately for some semblance of control over his fraying emotions, but the sound of distant screaming forced him up again before he was ready.

  He stood upon a vast frost-field, barren and featureless, but for the seething mass of flesh and fur and steel writhing across it in the distance. A battle. More men than he’d ever seen in one place, spilling blood at a scale he’d never imagined possible. Unlike his within his father’s memory, the emotions he could feel here from whoever’s memory this was were muted, dwarfed by the dry-mouthed terror welling up deep inside him.

  Among the fury, and the chaos, strode a half-dozen creatures, ten men tall with wolf-like muzzles and the hulking bodies of bears. Unlike the creature he hunted, these beasts wore coats of oaken brown rather than snow-white, but were otherwise entirely identical. Boulder-sized paws swung heavily through the throng of men, cutting them down indiscriminately.

  This alone was enough, but then T’aakshi caught sight of strange black shapes on the backs of the beasts. The shapes of men with spears in hand, riding—

  The feeling of a hand upon his shoulder set his heart racing, and he staggered away, turning clumsily to face the culprit, eyes wild. The strange old man from outside of the tower smiled at him, the expression devoid of all joy.

  “You have outstayed your welcome, boy,” he rasped, black gums visible past cracked lips.

  “What is happ—”

  T’aakshi had blinked, and in that moment, the man had closed the distance with him fully, and placed his bony index finger against his lips, silencing him.

  “Always the wrong question! Do you not hear it? The baying of wolves belongs not to the tanae, boy!”

  T’aakshi opened his mouth to respond, but hesitated, the man’s words striking a chord with him. Howling. Wolves, not wind. The sound that had been following him since he had arrived here. Plainswolves. But he was yet to see one in this place, and as the old man had appeared when he had first heard it, T’aakshi had assumed the man had been its source.

  “They’re outside.”

  “I’m assuming you have others with you.”

  T’aakshi nodded, mouth dry. “How do I get out of here?”

  The man cackled in response, fading into nothing, the still echoing laugh the only evidence he’d been there to begin with. T’aakshi felt like screaming. If the wolves were at the camp, the others were probably fighting already. If there were a lot, they would need him. He needed to get out of here. He needed—

  He fell for the final time. Clamping his eyes shut tight, T’aakshi imagined the door he had come through to arrive in the tower and held it in his mind, willing himself back to that door, even as he spiralled through the endless abyss.

  T’aakshi’s boots touched the ground, wooden door immediately in front of him and burst through. He was positive that this door was the right one, and sure enough, it led to the jungle where he had first met the old man. T’aakshi didn’t wait for a repeat encounter and dashed off in the direction he had come, hurtling back toward the bridge and his people, the howling of wolves shattering the eerie silence.